A pair of long-suffering Gloucestershire County Cricket club fans attempt to put the world (and the Glos administration) to rights. Themes include: Is one England ODI a year a good model for financial success and ground redevelopments, whether a batting average of 35 in Division 2 of the County Championship is acceptable and why Glos continue to be rubbish.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

Another defeat with lots of positive experiences

Northants beat Gloucestershire by 121 runs.

Gloucestershire continued their slide down the table with last weeks defeat to Northants. Gloucestershire fought hard and, in fairness, came damn close to saving the game. There were only 2 minutes left when last week Liam Norwell was LBW. Gloucestershire will take lots of positives from the match, and the youngsters will have learnt a lot from the experience.....

We've heard this before this season.Put simply, Glos fought hard on the final day of a game that they had never been in. Northants racked up 300 for 4 on day one and, despite a spirited fight back with the ball that restricted Northants to just 400 in their first innings, the batting then crumbled to 133 for 6 and only a 'proper' hundred from the Jessop Tavern View's favourite Irishman scraped us past the follow-on. We always knew Marshall would come good. Class is permanent, and all that.

Northants' runs were scored by a off-spinning allrounder, acting as an emergency opener, and a Scottish bloke. That really says all you need to know about the Gloucestershire attack. The wickets were shared around amongst the bowlers. Nobody was really punished, but, yet again, the feeling is that this attack doesn't have anything even resembling a strike bowler. Gidders and Saxelby are admirable grinders, but are unlikely to rip through a top order. Liam Norwell was making his first appearance in the championship for over a year. Can he develop into that strike bowler? Ed Young appears to have learnt about as much from Darren Lehmann about spin bowling as you would expect, considering Lehmann was a batsman. Presumably though, Ed knows a few good bars in Adelaide.

The batting continues to flatter to deceive, and still fails to produce as a unit. Individuals continue to score hundreds (which hasn't always been the case.....2010 saw Glos have to wait till August to have its first centurion) but in order to set up victories you need the whole batting order to fire. Captain Gidders now has 162 runs at 18 this season. 70 of those runs came in one innings. Things are so bad that we even drafted back Jon Batty.

Gloucesterahire now lie third bottom of the second division. We don't have great hopes for this season, and we aren't going to get downhearted too early. The boys continue to fight hard in every game, which is more than a lot of Gloucestershire teams have done in the past 10 years. We will give them time to come good. The Jessop Tavern View just continues to suspect that there is not a huge amount of talent in the youngsters who have come through. Good honest pros, but not match winners. We hope to be proved wrong.....hell, if Hamish can prove us wrong, then anyone can (except Jon Batty).